


The Monsters Under the Bed, and Other Friends Sadie Made

by puella_nerdii



Category: Princess Princess (Webcomic)
Genre: Childhood, F/F, Pets, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, cross-species communication, pets with very sharp teeth, supportive girlfriends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 16:25:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/puella_nerdii/pseuds/puella_nerdii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sadie's world is full of monsters, but monsters don't seem quite so monstrous once they become your friends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Monsters Under the Bed, and Other Friends Sadie Made

**Author's Note:**

  * For [carnationsandrobots](https://archiveofourown.org/users/carnationsandrobots/gifts).



There are monsters under Sadie's bed. Real ones.

"It's just the wind," the captain of the guard says. But Sadie's windows are shuttered tight, and all last week when Sadie's peeped outside them, none of the leaves have shaken on the trees and no clouds have blown over the moon.

"It's your bed creaking," the chief cook says, "or one of the palace cats got itself into your room." He gives her three cookies to put a spring in her step and scoots her out the door, before Sadie can tell him that creaky beds don't whisper _SadieSadieSadieSadie_ over and over again. And cats don't, either.

"It's indigestion," the palace healer says, even though Sadie's stomach feels fine.

"Don't be scared, Sadie," Papa tells her when she bursts into his room in the middle of the night, hiccupping on her tears. "Monsters under the bed aren't real."

"But ogres are real! And trolls, and dragons, and werewolves—"

Papa smiles and ruffles her hair. "All those monsters are too big to fit under your bed, Sadie. And none of our knights or sorcerers would ever let one into the palace."

"But what if it was a really _small_ monster? There are really small monsters, right?"

"If they're smaller than you, they can't be all that scary."

"Spiders are scary," Sadie mumbles, staring at her slippers. "And they're smaller than me."

Papa's quiet for a minute. Sadie squinches her eyes shut and searches for something to listen to. If she doesn't hear anything new, all the old sounds will come back: the whispering, and the slow clicking on the flagstones, and something slithering back and forth, back and forth, from the head of her bed to the foot.

"All right," he says, "here's what we'll do. I'll tell the servants to put a lamp in your room and keep it lit through the night. And tomorrow morning, I'll give you a book. It's a bestiary—do you know what that is?"

Sadie shakes her head.

"It will tell you about all kinds of different monsters. Where they live, what they eat, and how to get rid of them, if you have to."

"I don't want to learn about monsters." Sadie fights back a giant sniffle, not very well. "I just want them to go away."

"How can you make them go away, if you don't know what you're facing?"

"But they're scary."

Papa smiles again. His smile's so soft around the edges, like the corners of an old book. "Sometimes, sweetheart, they're as scared of you as you are of them."

***

Sadie doesn't want to tell Papa that he's wrong, but he can't be right. Sadie's not scary. Sadie's not much of anything. Sadie cries when she skins her knees, and can't see anything in fires or crystal balls no matter how hard she tries, and has to get the seams of her dresses let out all the time. There's nothing scary about any of that.

_Claire_ could probably scare monsters. Claire scares a lot of people. Most of the maids won't go near her rooms anymore, and it took Papa a whole month to find her another tutor after her last one disappeared. Claire scares Sadie, too, but Sadie still decides to ask her about the monsters under her bed.

"Oh, there are lots of monsters small enough to hide under your bed," Claire says. "And most of them love to eat little girls. Especially little girls who stuff their faces with cookies all day."

"I don't eat cookies _all_ day," Sadie tries to say, but Claire talks over her, like usual.

"Some of them gobble you up on the spot." Claire smiles, and all her teeth gleam. "But some of them want to roast you first, or grind you up into paste, or pull out your bones and—"

Sadie claps her hands over her ears and cries.

At night, the monsters growl even louder than before. She curls up around her pillow and hides under both her blankets, but she's sure the monsters see her anyway. Maybe they're not growling; maybe they're laughing at her. The lamp flickers. The shadows on the wall stretch long and thin. Sadie doesn't want to look at anything anymore, even the bestiary on her night table. A dragon's face is on the cover, outlined all in gold, and when the lamplight falls on the book just right, its eyes shine right at her.

The next morning, Sadie yawns and yawns, and the skin under her eyes swells up like bruises. 

"The monsters can get you even if you stay awake," Claire whispers to her at breakfast. "There's nothing you can do to stop them."

Knowing that doesn't help Sadie sleep any better.

***

One day, Papa goes out riding in the forest. He'll be back by sunset, he says, but he comes back much earlier than that. The guards carry him through the palace doors and shout all at once for healers and Papa's face is as grey as stone.

"We don't know what happened," the captain of the guard says. Her knees are shaking. "We approached a bend in the river, and his Majesty fell off his horse, like an invisible hand dragged him out of the saddle—"

An invisible hand?

Sadie hurries up the steps, huffing and puffing her way to her room. The bestiary is where it always is on her night table, but the dragon can't glare at her in the middle of the day, so it's easier to pick the book up. She flips through the pages as fast as she can, searching for anything about _invisible_ or _forest_ or _river_. 

Jinn are invisible, and can cast curses on people they don't like. Basilisks live in forests and turn peoples' hearts to stone with a glare. Yakshis wait on the side of the road and lure men off it to drink their blood. Vodyanoy ride on half-sunken logs in rivers and drown travelers, so they'll have slaves in their kingdoms under the water.

There are so _many_ monsters, and they're all strong and clever and cruel. Even if one of them hurt Papa, what could she do about it? She can't use magic. She's no good with a sword. She can't even fall asleep most nights anymore because of monsters under her bed that might not even be real. She's stupid and useless, just like Claire always says.

Sadie wails. Her tears splash onto the book's pages and blur the ink. 

***

There's only one monster in the tower. He crouches in front of the window and growls at Sadie whenever she gets too close. He's half as big as her, but he growls louder than the monsters under the bed did. She builds a nest of pillows and buries herself in it. It doesn't make her feel much safer.

A day passes, then a week, and Sadie still keeps a few feet away from the window. There's not that much space in the tower to begin with, though. She's the only one in here—well, her and the monster—but it feels crowded. There's nowhere to go. There's not much to _do_. She reads, but she's running out of new books. Maybe Claire could give her more, if she asked nicely? Three times a day, food appears on Sadie's table out of nowhere. If Claire can send her food, she can probably send books, too.

She wonders if Claire's mostly forgotten about her already. She wonders if the rest of the kingdom did. What did Claire tell them? Maybe Claire didn't have to tell them anything. Maybe nobody really noticed that she's not there anymore.

The food shows up before Sadie starts crying. And there are cookies today. She tries to smile, even if there's no one around to see.

Somewhere behind her, she hears a low whine.

"Who's there?" she asks. There's no response. Her hands tremble. She turns around.

The monster's in front of the window, the same as he's been. But he's different, somehow. He's lying on his belly instead of crouching, and his wings droop. His eyes are like clouded glass; there's no shine in them at all.

"Hello," she says. Her voice sounds funny, like an out-of-tune pipe. She swallows and tries again. "What's wrong?"

He tilts his head to look at her, then lets it flop to the side.

What's wrong with him? Whenever the palace cats acted like that, it meant they were—well, it meant a lot of things, depending on the cat. Sometimes they were sick. Sometimes they were hungry. Sometimes they were bored, and wanted to be petted. Do any monsters like being petted? She doesn't know. She doesn't even know what kind of monster he _is_.

Papa's bestiary is on the shelf. Sadie pulls it down and flips through, studies the illustrations. Some of them are pretty gross. She makes a face at one monster, who has a foot growing out of his head. But there, right on the next page, is a drawing that looks kind of like her monster does. It has the same stubby snout, the same nub on its forehead, the same striped belly. 

The caption reads _a young dragon_.

Sadie yelps, the book slipping from her hands. The monster--the _dragon_ \--doesn’t seem to notice. 

Is he really a dragon, though? Maybe she didn’t look at the illustration closely enough. Dragons are supposed to fly, and breathe fire, and sit on top of piles of gold, and kidnap young maidens. Well, he’s sort of kidnapped her. Sort of. But nothing about the rest of the description fits. And even a baby dragon must be bigger than a cat, right? She opens the book again to check.

_At two years of age, the average dragon measures three feet from snout to tip of tail. Its growth rate thereafter depends on its diet; with a steady supply of food, a dragon can continue to grow throughout its lifetime, though its rate of growth slows drastically once it reaches its full maturity at age fifty._

“Oh,” Sadie says. “You’re just a baby.”

The dragon’s ears prick up, and it yawns. It has a lot of teeth for a baby. But its teeth are small and round, nothing like the long fangs sketched on the next page. _Dragons use their caniniform teeth to hold their prey firmly in order to tear it apart, and during territorial conflicts, will also wield their teeth as weapons_ , the book says. Sadie wrinkles her nose. _The caniniform teeth, however, do not elongate until the dragon reaches seven to ten years of age; before that, dragons must prey on smaller animals, and the youngest dragons rely on their parents to hunt, and occasionally even masticate their food for them._

_Masticate_ means _chew_ , Sadie remembers. She almost says _ew_ , but it’s not the dragon’s fault that its parents have to chew up its food first. And the dragon probably thinks Sadie’s forks and knives and plates are just as strange.

If the dragon’s parents haven’t been feeding it since it came to the tower, though, how has it been eating? Come to think of it, Sadie hasn’t seen it eat at all.

She turns to the section that says _Diet_ , and hopes _young maidens_ isn’t listed in it.

The bestiary says dragons are omnivores. Omnivore means _eats anything._ Sadie looks at the cookies stacked on her plate, then at the dragon, whose tail twitches sluggishly against the floor.

“You must be hungry,” she says. “So you can have one of my cookies, if you want.”

She slides the cookie to him across the floor. Baby teeth or not, she doesn’t want to stick her hand too close to a dragon’s mouth. The dragon hisses, and Sadie’s spine jumps, but it crawls forward and sniffs the cookie.

“You should eat it while it’s still warm.” She doesn’t know if dragons understand humans, but she doesn’t have anyone else to talk to here. “The bestiary says you’ll eat anything, but you must like warm food best. That must be what your parents fed you.”

The dragon’s tongue snakes past his jaws. Slowly, he licks the cookie. He makes a low trilling noise, something between a chirp and a purr. Then he pounces on the cookie and gobbles it down to the last crumb. When he’s done, he opens his jaws, like a baby bird asking for more from its mother.

Sadie giggles and tosses another cookie down his gullet.

***

Young dragons are called kits, Sadie learns. Parents teach their kits how to fly and hunt and breathe fire, and protect them until they’re strong enough to dig their own lairs out of cliffsides, or burn them into the rock. Dragons never nest on the ground unless they’re sick--the closer to the sky they are, the happier they’ll be.

Maybe that’s why the dragon spends so much time at the window. It isn’t only to scare Sadie away.

“It must be hard for you, too.” She puts the bestiary down. “You can’t fly yet, so you can’t leave, either. And you don’t have anyone to teach you how.” Where are his parents, she wonders? Are they dead, or are they flying all over the country looking for him?

How did Claire expect this dragon to guard her, when he’s too young to look after himself? Sadie’s fists tighten at her sides; her nose stings. She’s _angry_ at Claire for the first time since she was sent here, angry enough that she marches over to the table and sets her whole plate in front of the dragon. “It’s not fair,” she says. “It’s not fair, and I’m really sorry--“

The anger fizzles out, and her throat clogs.

The dragon noses a piece of bread off the plate and pushes it towards her.

“Are you trying to feed me, too?” she asks.

He trills.

Her throat stuffs up even more, but she manages to say, “Thank you.”

***

Sadie names the dragon Oliver, after the author of the bestiary. Oliver seems to like his name. He turns around to listen whenever Sadie calls him by it, at least. 

The bestiary says that dragons scrape themselves against sunny rocks to shed loose scales. Sadie doesn’t have any sunny rocks, but she does have the back of her hairbrush. When Oliver itches at a spot behind his ear all day, Sadie comes towards him--slowly, with her palms up and the hairbrush laid across them--and scours the loose scales away.

The bestiary also says that dragons have “ _an innate appreciation of bright and reflective surfaces_.” Sadie lets Oliver play with her spoons, since he won’t poke himself in the eye with those. One day she uses her hand mirror to create little patches of light for Oliver to chase across the room.

The bestiary has lots of things to say about other creatures, too. Once Sadie’s read through the section on dragons at least fifteen times, she turns to the beginning, the book draped over part of her lap and Oliver’s head draped over the other. 

There’s more to monsters than having feet grow out of their heads or eating people. Ogres perform ancient folk-dances to attract mates, and some ogres dance for three days straight to show off. Some jinn trick and curse people, but others are powerful guardians, and they have their own kingdoms and systems of law. Trolls carve entire cities out of rock and ice. And werewolves like to be scritched behind the ears.

“Maybe I shouldn’t call them monsters anymore,” Sadie says one evening. “Or maybe I shouldn’t think of _monsters_ as a bad word.”

Oliver rumbles. She’s pretty sure he means _yes_.

***

Sadie runs into some of those monsters after Amira rescues her from the tower. In a way, they feel less scary than everything else. At least she’s read about them before, and studied pictures, and tried to perform some of the ogre folk-dances herself. She’s never seen or read about _anyone_ like Amira. But if that’s scary, it’s a good scary, she decides. 

Becoming queen is scary, too. Claire’s reign left the kingdom’s treasury almost empty and the kingdom’s prisons overflowing. The farmers and townspeople still lock their doors tightly at night and refuse to answer anyone who knocks. And none of the servants have gone into Claire’s or Sadie’s quarters in years, so who knows what’s waiting for them in there?

“Let’s find out!” Amira says, drawing her sword.

“Wait!” Sadie says, catching her wrist. “You shouldn’t go in--”

“Huh? Why not?”

Sadie’s cheeks flare bright red. “There are monsters under my bed. I think.”

“Oh,” Amira says. “That bites. But you’re the monster expert, right? So you can tell them to go away.”

“I don’t think they’d listen to me.”

“You got Oliver to listen to you. And that ogre, too. And even your sister! Kind of.”

She has a point. Amira usually does have points, even when they’re weird ones. 

“I want to go to the library first,” Sadie says. She had to leave Papa’s bestiary back in the ruins of the tower, but another copy might exist here somewhere.

It does, although Sadie has to stand on her tiptoes to pull it down from the shelf. She hugs the book for a second and breathes in the smell of old paper and ink, of dust and leather. That smell almost feels more like home than the palace itself does. 

She’s not quite sure what she’s looking for at first, but she knows it when she finds it.

_Bogeys_ , she reads. There’s no illustration next to it. The bestiary explains that bogeys come in different forms. _Many will appear as owls, lizards, spiders, or strange combinations of the three: an owl with a reptilian tail, perhaps, or a spider with a prominent beak. At other times, bogeys will take the shape of tall and skeletal people, cloaked entirely in shadow. They shun the light, and thrive in the dark_.

She reads on, her brows furrowed, and tells Amira, “I think I have an idea.”

***

“Excuse me,” Sadie says, even though she doesn’t really need permission to knock on her own door. She shifts her lantern higher. “Mr. Bogey, you’re still in there, aren’t you?”

The hissing seeps through the crack in the door: _SadieSadieSadieSadie_. Old fears knock her knees together and old screams find their way back to her throat, but Amira squeezes Sadie’s hand and Oliver nudges Sadie’s ankles. They’re looking out for her. She needs to look out for herself, too.

“Mr. Bogey,” she says, “I can’t understand you if you whisper. Can you speak louder, please?”

There’s silence from behind the door. Sadie curls her toes up tight, but keeps her chin up.

“My throat hurts,” the bogey says. It’s still whispering, but its voice sounds closer. “I can’t speak any louder than this.”

Sadie blinks. “Oh. Then I’m coming in, so we can talk to each other better.”

“Sadie,” Amira says, “are you sure--“

“Yeah.” Sadie smiles and squeezes Amira’s hand back. “It’s still my room.”

The door creaks open. Sadie shutters the lantern partway, so the light won’t hurt the bogey.

It’s hard to see exactly what the bogey looks like, but he’s decided to make himself skinny and two-legged, with a long sharp chin and knobby fingers. “Has your throat been hurting you all this time?”

The blob of blackness where the bogey’s head should be bobs up and down. She thinks it nodded.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she says. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I tried,” he rasps. “But when I called your name, you never answered.”

“Where I come from, it’s pretty rude to say someone’s name over and over again if they don’t want to talk to you,” Amira says.

“It’s rude here, too. Don’t worry, Mr. Bogey. I’m not mad at you. I _was_ pretty scared when you kept whispering my name, though.” She sets the lantern down, next to Oliver. If it goes out, he can relight it. “You must have been lonely here.”

The bogey nods again.

“Is that why you called me?”

Another nod.

“And then I left, so you haven’t had anyone to play with.” She taps her finger against her chin, thinking. “The bestiary said that you like to scare children, but that you run away if any grown-ups come near. Then I wondered, what if _you’re_ scared of grown-ups, and you don’t mean to scare children?”

“Whoa,” Amira says.

“A lot of kids are afraid of the dark, though. And they’re not supposed to leave their beds in the middle of the night. So that’s why they don’t answer you, or they tell you to go away.” _And turning into a spider with a beak is a little freaky_ , she almost adds, but she doesn’t need to be mean about the way other people look. “I know you don’t mean to scare them, but they get scared.”

“What should I do?” the bogey asks. Its spindly shoulders slump.

“I don’t know if I can play with you,” Sadie says. “Being queen takes up a lot of time. But Oliver will need someone to play with, now that I’m going to be so busy.”

Oliver rumbles.

“And some of the children in town might play with you, too. But you have to ask their parents first, and you have to get them home on time. All right?”

“All right,” the bogey says, raspy as ever, but somehow his voice sounds lighter.

“I’ll make sure you get some tea to drink,” Sadie says as she turns to the door, Amira’s hand still in hers. “That sore throat sounds _awful_.”

“You know, you’re really good at this queen thing,” Amira says, once Oliver nudges the door shut behind them.

Sadie shakes her head. “That wasn’t me being a queen.”

“Sure it was! If you can face down monsters, you can totally face down your court.”

“I know more about monsters than I do about my court, I think.”

“But you’ll learn. Even if you’re scared, you’ll learn. I know it.”

Blushing bright enough to light up the hallway, Sadie stands on her tiptoes and kisses Amira on the cheek.

Once she’s done it once, it’s less scary to do it again.

**Author's Note:**

> For carnationsandrobots, for the following prompt: "Amira/Sadie, obviously. I'm pretty cool with anything? Porn, adventures, domesticity stuff, I don't really care. Post-canon would be fun, or something detailing their separate lives until they're reunited. Up to you!" I hope you enjoy it!
> 
> Thanks to M. for betaing.


End file.
